I remember a time when my mom was worried about me drinking coffee, afraid that it would “stunt my growth” or some nonsense. Back in the late 1980s when I was growing up, there were enough headlines and Redbook features to feed those concerns. She was convinced that drinking caffeine in my adolescence might re-wire my brain or cause long-term health problems. It certainly wasn’t caffeine that she needed to worry about. According to a recent study published in the journal Addiction, alcohol abuse during adolescence “alters the development of the brain” and causes “cortical thinning…in young people who had been heavy drinkers.” The study reveals as much about the human brain as it confirms the devastating, lasting effect alcohol can have on a young person’s lie before it even gets started.
Gray Matters
“Teens who drink heavily are more likely than their peers to have less gray matter, an important brain structure that aids in memory, decisions, and self-control,” a Reuters feature on the study said. The study, which comes out of the University of Eastern Finland, doesn’t deliver earth-shattering news on the alcohol-causes-problems front, but it’s certainly a landmark study when it comes to just how differently alcohol wreaks havoc on the adolescent brain versus the adult brain. Less gray matter means less control and, therefore, serious problems when it comes to some very important—if not critical—personality traits that are still emerging in teenage years.
In many ways, it’s something of an alcoholic catch-22: while there’s widespread evidence that many people are genetically predisposed to addiction and alcoholism, the brain itself is the common denominator in those very same problems. In other words, if you’re already prone to drinking problems, your brain won’t be doing anything to help. It’s the reason you’re drinking in the first place—and it’s not exactly going to get better the more you drink. Your brain is likely to make everything worse. “Brain structural changes might be one factor that contributes to the social and mental problems among substance-using individuals,” the study’s lead author, Noora Heikkinen, told Reuters. The study acknowledged that “substance use has been found to be connected to social exclusion, mental health problems and lower educational attainment.”
What Was the Study About?
Researchers “studied 62 young adults who were participating in the Finnish Youth Wellbeing Study,” in order to examine how alcohol affected teenage brains. From 2013 to 2015, the teenaged participants “filled out questionnaires, answering questions about how often they drank and how many drinks they consumed.” Intriguingly, these same participants had answered similar questions five and ten years earlier, “starting at age 13.” Of the group, over half (35 of the participants) were classified as heavy drinkers, the study found. “They drank four or more times a week, or they drank less often but when they did, they drank heavily,” the study said. “The other 27 young adults in the study were considered light drinkers.”
“All participants were academically successful,” the study noted, “and the prevalence of mental health problems did not differ between the two groups. Although the heavy-drinking participants had used alcohol regularly for ten years, approximately 6-9 units roughly once a week, none of them had a diagnosed alcohol use disorder.” Additionally, the study’s results revealed that neither group demonstrated depression or other serious mental illness. “Heavy and light drinkers had similar rates of anxiety, personality disorders, and drug use. Heavy drinkers were significantly more likely to smoke cigarettes than light drinkers, however.” With such minor similarities and differences, it’s worth focusing on what exactly hangs in the balance for teenagers.
What Does It All Mean?
“The maturation of the brain is still ongoing in adolescence…especially the frontal areas and the cingulate cortex [which don’t]develop until the twenties,” Heikkinen said. “Our findings strongly indicate that heavy alcohol use may disrupt this maturation process.” The “cingulate cortex” is also largely responsible for impulse control, the study observed, which plays into a lot of alcoholic behavior (mine included). It also, according to the study, “plays an important role in the development of a substance use disorder later in life.” Still, for everything that’s known about the brain and alcohol abuse, there remain just as many mysteries. For one, researchers can’t pinpoint the exact connection between the brain’s structural changes and the exact levels of alcohol that trigger those changes. However, one positive finding from the study is that, while alcoholic damage to the brain can be both severe and lifelong, it’s not necessarily permanent.
“Some of the volumetric changes may be reversible if alcohol consumption is reduced significantly,” the study’s researchers said. They also noted that “as risk limits of alcohol consumption have not been defined for adolescents, it would be important to screen and record adolescent substance use, and intervene if necessary.” In other words, teens’ brains exist in a unique, delicate period of time in relation to alcohol abuse. Researchers refer to this period as a “vulnerability window”—a unique, delicate period of time where every negative action has the potential to have lasting permanence but can be, if stopped early enough, reversed. “If teens drink heavily during this sensitive time, they may cause damage to their brains that can make their drinking behavior worse and cause other problem behaviors like missing school or having unsafe sex,” the Reuters article said. “Parents and teachers must be alert to the vulnerability window during adolescence, and seek help as early as possible, to prevent more serious damage to the brain.” While awareness and education may indeed be the key, not everyone gets so lucky. Many teens don’t have those luxuries. Sadly, for many, their lives are ticking time bombs that will continue counting down to zero.
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